The LMS Market: Hotter than Ever

3 Responses

  1. Thanks Josh, this is a pretty useful article for me to get a view into the US market for LMS. I also like your view as broader than the strict LMS view.

    In your opinion, are the open-source solutions still considered as a no-market (in the same broader view of “talent management suites”)?

    Some of the Bersin & Associates website content helped me understanding the big picture as well. Thanks for the resources.

    • joshbersin says:

      Hi Yannick. We dont see the open-source LMS systems having any major impact on the corporate market. Corporate LMS systems really need to be industrial strength (e.g. the data is often used for compliance and government reporting) – and the cost of maintaining open source is often just not something a major business wants to incur. There are a flurry of small LMS startups using open source as the base, but the real corporate LMS market is still a vendor-driven space.

  2. N Smith says:

    Hi Josh, I’ve only just come across your post. While OSS solutions may not be impacting the US market significantly, I have to respectfully disagree with your prediction as it applies here in Asia Pacific (and other parts of the world). As an independent LMS consultant, I’m regularly seeing OSS solutions (Moodle, in particular) win bids head-to-head against the ‘big boys’ (especially SumTotal and Saba who seem to have the biggest presence of the major players down here). Organisations such as British Petroleum, Shell Oil, Intel, Gulf Agency Corporation, most of the New Zealand government (who have *very* strong compliance, security and reporting requirements) as well as many other large firms and governments are selecting Moodle. I firmly believe this is only going to increase as Moodle adopts more corporate training functionality.

    Additionally, I also have to disagree with your comment that the cost of maintaining open source is “often just not something a major business wants to incur.” The cost of implementing, maintaining and supporting OSS is often *far* less than just the licensing costs alone of many of the major learning management systems.

    Thanks for your great contributions to the learning space!